Google Algorithm Updates - 2023 Ongoing Discussion

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I love how this thread becomes so active after an update. So many emotions and different results but at least everyone is mostly positive and motivating others to stick to it!

MrMedia said:
Extremely important and very overlooked practice imo.
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100% agree. It is a must, but it is the most time consuming and a pain (at least in my opinion). How often do clean up your content?

I know Google is bias towards Wikipedia, but there are 1000's of Wiki pages ranking #1 on Google and they haven't been updated for 300+ days lol.
 
A very interesting update.

From my own portfolio I can see that:

- General sites went up, and niche sites went down.
- Older sites have a tendency to go up rather than down

The strange thing is that the general sites have poor backlink profiles, horrible UI and low quality articles. They were made several years ago and haven't been touched for months or even years.

What I can see in my SERPs is that authority (links) and domain age seem to be favoured, like so many times before. But this time more than before.

For example, one general site is crushing it. It's a well-known publication with great backlinks. But their "best XXXX"-articles are literally just lists. No information at all, not even pros and cons of the products. It looks like this:
1. Product name
2. Product name
3. Product name
4. Product name

At the bottom they have written something like: "How we did the test: We used the product in a professional environment to see which one performs the best."

That's it.

90% of the content on the website is behind a paywall, as well.

Since they "review" everything known to man, they have thousands of pages. Extremely thin articles, we're talking 50-300 words.

More or less, the top 3 spots in the SERP are big brands with massive link profiles, but with articles that lack crucial information. Some of them are even using one of my websites (that wasn't favored in this update) as a reference, lol.

Due to the inflation of AI-written content. I think they put more emphasis on ranking sites that have been around for a long time and has good backlinks. No matter content quality. Links and age above everything else.

I have a site with a great link profile and it's a general site. But it dropped in positions, probably since it's only 1 and a half years old. Had it been 4 years older, it would probably have climbed.
 
I’m seeing a lot of the same other people here. Most sites in the niches I follow got demoted, while the “brands” (or those doing a good job of faking one) in those spaces got slight promotions. And as a whole, I think clicks for organic in general went down - there’s less of the pie to go around.

IMO - one needs to have ALL the right signals to succeed here. Not just good content…..not just good content and links….think ccarters post about brands that have everything from lots of social action, great user engagement, direct type in traffic, branded searches, links from associations in their niche, tons of content, great links, the whole friggen 9 yards.

Weaker hands get pushed out, if you’re trying to compete with the big boys then you need to invest like they do while having a sound strategy in place.

I know there’s nothing groundbreaking in my post here, but this is what I see in the niches I closely follow.
 
I have an older (5+ years) blog that got promoted in this update.

It's actually the first site I began working on in my original lab thread, a hobby site, that I was very passionate in.

It has a real social media following and it has organic links from newspapers, bloggers and NGOs.

I do believe this update has to do with those signals, high quality organic links, age etc. There's very little on-page in this update imo.
 
I've been adding "reddit" to a lot of my searches for a while now. Then I see stuff like this:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1704815530295677331

Can't help but wonder if G turned the "brand awareness" dial to 100 in an effort to combat thousand-pages-overnight AI sites that may nail on-page but which lack any brand awareness by any human whatsoever.

Since they can't filter out the generated content altogether they're more reliant on user signals and appending a brand name seems like it would be a pretty strong one to me.

Would also explain why niche sites, despite having dialed on-page and clean link profiles would get squashed by what feels like pure Fortune 500, because they lack that strong brand signal, either via appended searches or winning higher CTRs regardless of organic ranking..
 
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Google went too far with this recent update. It literally invalidated their whole E-E-A-T guide.

Let's say Hans is a high-tech machinery professor at ETH Zurich, which is probably the best technical school in the world. He is visible online, he has a LinkedIn profile, he has written papers on his work, he is invited to lectures. And he has a blog where he writes interesting articles about machinery, to popularize his work, research, and so on (let's say it's geared at high-school students interested in tech).

After a year of work, it gets a little traction, people love it, but... BAM - Google comes with the new update which hits small, fresh websites, which do not have the power (or interest) to pump out hundreds of articles per month. Remember, Hans is an engineering professor, he's an expert in his field - and precisely because he is an expert, he cannot pump out hundreds, and hundreds of blogs per month. He has to work on his research, be in his lab and coordinate other scientists. He can't hire writers from India to write his blogs, he can't experiment with YouTube...

The new update destroyed precisely these blogs written by experts in their field - simply because these experts don't have the DR80+, don't have aged domains, and cannot produce hundreds upon hundreds of blogs per month to satiate Google's appetite for topical authority.

The new update simply enforces what everyone already knows - just be a big, big, big, BIG website and Google will love you. It doesn't help the small blogs run by real experts. It's almost like SEO is going through a very, very high inflationary period.

Just be a Fortune 500 company, bro!
 
harrytwatter said:
I've been adding "reddit" to a lot of my searches for a while now. Then I see stuff like this: https://x.com/lilyraynyc/status/1704815530295677331?s=20

Can't help but wonder if G turned the "brand awareness" dial to 100 in an effort to combat thousand-pages-overnight AI sites that may nail on-page but which lack any brand awareness by any human whatsoever.

Since they can't filter out the generated content altogether they're more reliant on user signals and appending a brand name seems like it would be a pretty strong one to me.

Would also explain why niche sites, despite having dialed on-page and clean link profiles would get squashed by what feels like pure Fortune 500, because they lack that strong brand signal, either via appended searches or winning higher CTRs regardless of organic ranking..
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I don't know why G doesn't just turn up the dial on their pre-existing google sandbox... They could also throw in a modifier where content velocity exceeds a certain point and it triggers a manual review.
 
harrytwatter said:
I've been adding "reddit" to a lot of my searches for a while now. Then I see stuff like this: https://x.com/lilyraynyc/status/1704815530295677331?s=20
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If y'all affiliates had done as I told you and used quotes from Reddit, then your sites would be relevant for "-reddit" searches as well.

In the grand scheme, only a handful of sites make real tests like Consumer Reports or Runrepeat, however, if your idea of affiliate reviews is doing like Womenshealthmag and just listing up 10 products and acting as if you have any clue about them. That only works for DR80 sites.
 
The objective of the update was to deal with Parasite SEO and all they did was make Parasite SEO a more attractive option by knocking back legitimate websites and propping up big brands and UGC. Absolutely braindead.

I wouldn't trust Google to make me a cup of tea let alone manage a complex search engine these days. They've screwed around too much over the past few years and now everything is mixed up and disorganized - too disorganized to even know how to fix the issues.

You've got website authority based on links, A.I. content spam, and parasite SEO all screwing with each other at the same time. They want less A.I. spam, so they turn up the dial for authority (links). But this pushes non-DA 70+ websites out of the SERPs, and some queries don't have high authority websites to pull from, so the parasites get utilized because they have a higher DA than the average content website and more "trust." Then parasite SEO gets abused, so they raise the importance of authority again, knocking content websites back again, leaving more space for parasites, again. But if they lessen the importance of website authority via links, the A.I. spam will become more prominent again. It's a mess.
 
zak said:
Why do you think that?
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For example, there's a very prominent news website out of India that was allowing people to pay to publish posts - even affiliate posts. People did this to leverage the authority of the website, and because of the authority of the website, the SERPs got filled with crap. This particular website was literally copying and pasting existing posts on their website (and other people's sites) and re-publishing them with purchased affiliate link placements. And this is just a single website, there are plenty like this.
 
Yea, I know what parasite SEO is. I meant why do you think targeting it was the objective of the update?
 
zak said:
Yea, I know what parasite SEO is. I meant why do you think targeting it was the objective of the update?
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I'm 99.9% sure they stated it was in a release. I don't have the link but if you do some searching online you'll find it.
 
DanielS said:
I'm 99.9% sure they stated it was in a release. I don't have the link but if you do some searching online you'll find it.
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They mentioned two things:
  • Subdomains will start to be considered in the overall site quality score for the root domain.
  • Third-party content will begin to be considered as well.
They clarified today I believe (so I read) that they have yet to take third-party content into consideration. How they're NOT doing that yet is interesting because for it to rank well it typically needs to be in a sub-folder of the root domain.

Some sites did sub-domains (like coupon code sites and so forth) but most parasites are posting right on the root domain and having the articles indexed (at least for X amount of time, even on WebMD and very large, trusted sites). So if that's not being taken into consideration... how are they telling it apart and WHY were they ever NOT taking it into consideration?

Somebody seems to be lying here from my limited point of view.
 
It's nice that with the FTC case, we now have evidence in court through discovery that Google does in fact make direct lies to the public. What has come out so far is in internal emails they admit they "adjust" pricing frequently on paid ads in SERPs to achieve revenue goals, while publicly claiming pricing is 100% based on competition.

Just imagine what could be found if most communication was not on an internal program designed to not retain any data after 30 days. Google manipulates the SERPs whenever it feels like it in a very manual way to choose winners and losers. Many large sites thriving/dying are probably being manipulated internally by an employee getting paid off and if Google tried to stop employees from this they already have all the evidence to rat Google out so it continues and grows. That is why the SERPs have been getting so bad for the last 10 years.
 
Pay to play or influence to play definitely happens. The most atrocious and egregious example that was out in the open was Genius, the lyric annotation site and they're link scheme:

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They were penalized as they should have been, but everyone was shocked when in 10 single days they were unpenalized and ranking successfully (as in top ranks).

The problem is, for us we have to go through the song and dance of emailing every site and trying to get the links removed, proving we did so, wait on a Google employee to tell us it's not good enough, do it again, disavow the rest, wait on Google to crawl it all, then hopefully pop out manually or algorithmically.

The nice thing for Genius was they had venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz (look at the projects they do or have backed). If I recall correctly, Marc Andreessen got involved personally and badabing badaboom bob's your uncle. Which means backdoor deals of some sort go down, even if no money trades hands.
 
I'm putting together a list of patterns that I've noticed on a small handful of sites that either got hit or didn't get hit. I'll probably ask some folks to do a very brief questionnaire in the near future, to see if any of my theories hold water when we introduce a larger sample.

In the meantime, has anyone who has been hit hard by recent updates been using AdSense instead of Ezoic/Monumetric/Mediavine/AdThrive? Just curious.

Feel free to PM if you'd prefer to keep it private, and also PM if you're open to answering a few additional broad, general questions about your sites (Whether you have small sites, big ones, sites that are growing, sites that tanked - it's all going to be helpful so I'd like to hear from you.)

Still working on the questions, but if there's some initial interest in participating, that'll be good fuel. You don't need to share your URL, or niche, or any specific numbers.
 
Ryuzaki said:
The problem is, for us we have to go through the song and dance of emailing every site and trying to get the links removed, proving we did so, wait on a Google employee to tell us it's not good enough, do it again, disavow the rest, wait on Google to crawl it all, then hopefully pop out manually or algorithmically.
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Do you actually disavow links? I have been looking at my backlinks and I can see some are unnatural and spammy, but its not like I am going and getting these. I def get a list and send it to Google for disavow - I just don't know if its a good time investment
 
The core update pushed me up by 300%, the HCU dropped me down to lower levels than before the core update.

I was seeing hope for the future, now...I just can't fuckin take it anymore.

What is going on?
A bizarre thing with one of the sites is that I hold many #1-3 positions but don't know where the traffic is going. The keys have volume and I have a history with those keywords, they are constant throughout the year, with no seasonality on them.

All the trackers report the positions as being correct, ahrefs find the position as being correct. Checking them manually, they are there.

But the traffic barely if it gets to my site. I think visitors are getting siphoned somewhere but not to me.

It all started with the HCU update.
 
ianovici said:
A bizarre thing with one of the sites is that I hold many #1-3 positions but don't know where the traffic is going.
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Google?

Have you checked what the search results look like recently in your niche in your main visitor markets? And on mobile?

As an example, I hold #8 position for a good kw with 40,500 searches per month. It now takes me four scrolls to reach my site in the rankings. The entire first two screens are filled with Google 'information'.
 
The first page results for some of my best ranking keywords are all quora posts, reddit posts, very old forum posts, and very old and poorly written blogs.

There's good news, though. A lot of SEO and niche sites guys (nicheranger, chrisbarnes3d, mintedempire, briandordevic) are saying traffic is picking up again. Perhaps Google is reversing the update.

Let's see where it goes. Meanwhile, don't panic.
 
tziahs said:
The first page results for some of my best ranking keywords are all quora posts, reddit posts, very old forum posts, and very old and poorly written blogs.

There's good news, though. A lot of SEO and niche sites guys (nicheranger, chrisbarnes3d, mintedempire, briandordevic) are saying traffic is picking up again. Perhaps Google is reversing the update.

Let's see where it goes. Meanwhile, don't panic.
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I read on another forum that John Mueller tweeted about a low chance of a rollback as this HCU is going as intended.

I can't seem to find that twit though.

Can anyone confirm this?
 
This update is really weird for me.

On one of my Dutch sites I lost all featured snippets (I optimize my articles for that) and they were quite a lot. It almost looks like some sort of sidewide snippet ban at the moment. Now I've seen this happening before when an update is going on, and they came back later. Right now my competitor took them all over...

But the weird thing is that the traffic didn't drop that much, it did like 10% or so I think. But today it is dropping quite hard, but all rankings are the same.

I'm really not sure what to think of this update. I really have the feeling they tweaked some buttons waaaaay too much for specific things. I can't imagine they keep it like this.

Here's a little screenshot of the traffic, you'll notice a big spike at last Sunday. I often see that when Google is up to something, and boy they were/are indeed...

9tzzkGW.png

(today's traffic is not complete yet, but I think it's like 30-40% lower than usual atm)
 
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